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In
Review Archive |
In Review
 Turneresque
by Elizabeth Willis
Burning Deck, 2003
Elizabeth Willis
is the author of two other books of poems: Human Abstract
(Penguin, 1995) and Second Law (Avenue B, 1993). Her poems
have appeared in American Poetry Review, Aufgabe, Chicago
Review, Conjunctions, The Germ, How2, etc. She teaches at
Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.
Reviewed by Catherine Daly
In Turneresque,
Elizabeth Willis collects poems that collectively continue to ponder
the classic problem of language in contemporary American
experimental poetry: referentiality. To what, if any thing, state,
or external reality, does language refer? Who observes, writes? What
is poetry’s content? Willis answers these questions in slightly
different ways in the different sections of her book.
Turneresque
begins with a poem entitled “Autographeme.” A grapheme is a
letter or other symbol that represents speech. An autographeme
would then be a letter or other symbol that represents itself. In
Willis’ poem, each stanza is a different definition of language. As
the poem begins, “A thought on the lip,” the book begins at the
moment speech is about to be uttered. Since Willis’ definitions are
in language, they define themselves—they are self-referential.
Language, and hence poetry, is “An easy messenger,” where messages
or meanings are conveyed not by a vehicle but by a person; a mirror
isolated from the myth of Narcissus in the lines, “The reflecting
pool / no one could read”; the author, and form itself, becomes an
editor in “…an abridgement / of whatever I contained”; and the
Tradition—formalist poetry—becomes an alien structure in “Others
formed an invisible order.”
It is no surprise to
find aspects of ars poetica in sophisticated poetry concerned with
language and poetry itself. The first section of Turneresque
consists of a suite of poems that refer to painters or other artists
in some way, “Modern Painters.” The painters are mostly precursors
of or influenced by the pre-Raphaelite painters of which Willis is
an expert. Of course, J.M.W. Turner is included. So is Richard Dadd,
a British painter and patricide who continued to paint after he was
institutionalized. Dadd’s style changed after he was committed in
the ways Willis notes in “Catalogue Raisonné,” “The plane of
foreground and background is equal.” His picture plane collapsed,
and fantastic detail became as important as figures in his pictures.
But the poem also contains references to Willis’ concerns regarding
language and meaning:
The grass
full of writing
A victim’s head contains a letter
the color of water
“Induce” across her hand (p. 18)
Throughout the book,
Willis explores all of the possible definitions or associations with
the book title. Beyond J.M.W. Turner, painter, and Ted Turner, media
mogul, a “turn” is a metaphor or trope, and a “turner” is a poet.
The contemporary poet’s concern with referentiality oddly echoes I.A.
Richards’ explanations of metaphor using his terms tenor,
vehicle, and ground. Richards is not concerned with the
ornamental image and the meaningful idea, per se. The tenor is the
underlying idea, the vehicle conveys it, and the tenor and the
vehicle share the ground. Or, as Willis observes in “The Tree of
Personal Effort,” a poem after Charles Rennie Macintosh that begins
the “Modern Painters” section, “The lost highway of ornament fades
into origin.”
The J.M.W.
Turner poem in this section, “Van Tromp, Going About to Please His
Masters, Ships a Sea, Getting a Good Wetting,” contains perhaps the
most thematic line or ars poetica in a section rife with such lines
as “A heavy craft in wordy water, taking on a master.” The vehicle
is poetry, “a heavy craft.” Reality is “wordy.” The vehicle precedes
the “master”/author, but conveys her.
The more contemporary
version of referentiality, revised from Pound’s imagistic movement
between things, perceiving them, and depicting them, and from
Wittgenstein’s ideas of language systems that reference themselves,
involves the relationship of language and its use. Much experimental
writing seeks not to refer to or carry meaning as a symbol might,
but to form meaning. The untitled prose sections in the last poem
and section of the book, “Drive,” seem to illustrate these ideas
beyond representation most clearly. The section begins with a quote
from Canadian poets Liliane and Cyril Welsh, “…one’s private
automobile ‘locates’ human concern and effort: the conveyance which
contains intrinsically no reference...” In the sixth section, Willis
writes,
“… we drive without a future,
left to wish outside the forward rush of things.
Who would not leave the mess for the illumination, the
culture for the poem?” (p. 90)
Like the sections of
“Drive,” the poems in the title section “Turneresque” are prose
poems. While Willis’ default unit is the line, many of the poems in
Turneresque are unlineated. The juxtapositions of phrases
that as lines seem abstract, disjointed, or fragmentary, are still
“enjambed” in the sentences. The qualifying clauses and commas in
the longer sentences lend Willis’ words a different sort of richness
and complexity than the “hard candies” of her lines.
Portions of the
section entitled “Sonnet” were published online at HOW2 as “Eight
Untitled Sonnets.” One of the wonderful features of the poetry in
HOW2 is that it is generally accompanied by “Working Notes” written
by the author. In the notes for “Eight Untitled Sonnets,” Willis
writes, “I spend a lot of time commuting so my line is often
sporadic & sprung, filled with minor subject matter except for the
backdrop of transitoriness, which seems to run through the sonnet as
a form.” The poems are not sonnets or related to sonnets except
perhaps as Willis mentions, that she sees in her poems and in the
sonnet a transitory tenor, a disposable referentiality outside of a
minor meaning. As she begins the first section of “Sonnet,”
To live in someone
else’s music (the musician
not the composer is free) (p. 31)
The poems in
Turneresque frequently relate to works appreciated for their
transcendence of genre: sonnets, classic B movies, canonical artists
who are outsiders in some way (painters Turner, Dadd, poets Blake,
Baudelaire). So, too, these are love poems, located where
referentiality breaks down, and is rebuilt.
Catherine
Daly is author of
DaDaDa (Salt Publishing, 2003) and Locket (Tupelo Press,
2004). She is also a widely published reviewer currently compiling a
book of review/essays about contemporary women’s experimental
poetry. She lives in Los Angeles, where she curates three reading
series.
Poet, please send me a proposal of your
review of a poetry book or chapbooks at:
liz@poetix.net. Write
"Proposal for In Review" in the subject line so I don t think it
s spam. - liz
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